by Tom Wood
He was safe. At least until he stepped outside his room.
He checked the time. He’d been asleep for a little more than four hours. A combination of necessity, experience, and training meant he rarely slept for much longer in a single period. His body required as much rest as the next man to function at one hundred percent, but he spread out his requirement whenever it was possible. Most assassins would elect to strike when the target was most vulnerable, and deep in the slow-wave stage three of non-REM sleep was just about the best way of ensuring that. At that point the target would suffer the highest arousal threshold—the lowest chance of waking. For the majority, that point was halfway through the sleep cycle, four or five hours after drifting off, in the early hours of the morning. He made sure never to be asleep during that time, and sleeping approximately four hours increased his chances of being awake when most killers would think it best to strike.
Victor stripped, stretched, and exercised, then ignored the sensory deprivation of the shower and took a bath. It was freestanding, deep and long, and he could relax without his limbs bunched up. Good hotels were a huge drain on his resources, but the monetary expense was almost offset by the ability to bathe in comfort.
The hotel was a beautiful Regency building with a grand facade, high ceilings, and magnificent chandeliers. Exploring it for the purposes of operational security had been nothing short of a pleasure. The lack of CCTV cameras—presumably for aesthetic considerations—was also to his particular tastes. He checked out, chatting banalities with the friendly clerk so as not to appear rude and therefore memorable, and took a cab deep into the city.
He considered the unexpected e-mail seeking his assistance while he entered a metro station, took the train at platform three because he saw three ticket booths were open, alighted at the second stop because two other people stood like him inside the car, and headed across to the southbound platform because a woman smiled at him as she approached the elevators.
A year ago he had deactivated several e-mail accounts through which independent brokers would contact him in the days when he had worked regularly as a freelance professional. People he had never met either offered him contracts or if he had operated for them before might ask to pitch him for particularly lucrative jobs. He would have more intimate contact with them only if they had misled or betrayed him, and then they would never have contact with him—or anyone else—ever again. It had been a dangerous but profitable existence and one he had believed himself to have mastered, but ultimately the isolation that kept him alive had led to a period of servitude. A slave with a gun, he had thought of himself at that time. After that, an independent contractor. Now he wasn’t sure what he was. Unemployed, maybe.
His last client had passed him no work recently. He didn’t know if that was noteworthy beyond a lack of jobs that required his particular talents. He wasn’t about to ask. Unemployed or not, the fallout from those contracts of the past few years—as well as those of his freelance days—meant he could not let his guard down for even a single day. His enemies were legion, and some possessed great power and means. Others did not, but a solitary bullet was the sum total of all the power any enemy would ever need. He accepted and had expected such threats. Only dead assassins had believed they could operate their trade with impunity. The astronomical fee he charged for his services reflected the danger he lived with on a day-to-day basis.
A teenage girl sitting nearby chewed on the nail of her fourth finger, so Victor disembarked the train at the fourth station. This time he elected to leave, because a keen-eyed security guard watching CCTV monitors might note he had had gone north, then south, then north again. Even a tourist wouldn’t make that kind of mistake. Especially one who didn’t look like a tourist.
Outside the station he took a cab, pretending he didn’t speak the language, mispronouncing landmarks until the driver had some idea of where he wanted to go. He gave it ten minutes, because the last two digits of the driver’s license number were five and two, and had him stop the car. The driver pulled over behind a BMW, so Victor took the next two right turns because B was the second letter of the alphabet, then continued walking, following the road he found himself upon, ignoring the next thirteen junctions, as M was the thirteenth letter, before alternating left and right for the next four turnings because W was the fourth letter when reading the alphabet backward.
He had detected no one, but that didn’t mean he was unobserved. If he was being followed the shadows would find no significance in his movements and ultimate location because he had never been there before and this end location was as close to a random result as any human could hope to create. The street was pedestrianized and lined with restaurants and bars. The crowd of people was dense and ever moving. It was a good place for drawing out shadows and losing them by entering one of the establishments. It was a poor location for an ambush, and until moments ago he had no idea he would be here, so any aggressors planning violence would have had no time to prepare. Nothing would happen here. For now, he was as safe as he was ever going to be.
He walked slowly along the street, listening to the sounds of joy and merriment surrounding him.
A young boy caught his eye. The kid was too young to be working in the area but old enough to be unaccompanied. His clothes were shabby and unclean, but he moved with purpose, sometimes walking fast, other times slow. The kid was malnourished and thin; the lack of calcium and calories in his diet had stunted his growth. A shame for all the obvious reasons, but beneficial for one.
The boy was a pickpocket. Victor didn’t see him make any attempts, but that was only because the boy was waiting for his best opportunity. He was patient and considered, and used his short height to good advantage. People barely noticed him, whereas in return his eye level was not far above that of trouser pockets and handbags. Victor respected the poise with which the kid conducted himself. He was a survivor. He was just like Victor had been at that age, having broken out of the orphanage, living on the streets, doing what he’d had to. Surviving.
Memories were distraction, so Victor cleared his mind. He moved his wallet from his inside jacket pocket and into the left pocket of his trousers.
The kid was good. He didn’t let the opportunity go to waste. Victor respected that.
Using his knuckles, he pushed open the door to a bar he liked the look of and stepped into a wall of heat and noise. It was closer to full than empty and had a pleasant atmosphere. Victor was never concerned by the kind of trouble that bars encouraged, but he tried to steer clear of ones where it was more likely to occur. He did everything in his power to avoid a confrontation with a civilian, but a man drunkenly determined to prove his masculinity would respond with equal aggression to passivity as he would to intimidation. Easier to shun those bars where such a man was likely to pass his time than try to pull a punch so that when it landed it did not kill that man.
He picked a spot at the bar and made eye contact with the barman, noting in his peripheral vision a short-haired Asian woman looking his way. Victor sipped an orange juice while he thought about the e-mail. Subject: I need your help. The body of the message consisted of nothing but a coded phone number. He knew the number because he knew the code because he knew the man who had sent it. He didn’t have to call the number to know it was a request for a face-to-face meeting. Something Victor rarely did, and rarer still when it was requested of him. It was uncommon for people who knew him to want to spend time in his company. Especially when the previous engagement had not ended well. Victor couldn’t help but be intrigued. The person who sent it knew enough about him to know exactly how big a request it was.
The e-mail had arrived in one of the few accounts he kept active. Scattered around the world were a number of contacts that he used to fill the gaps in his skill set that he could not afford to leave blank. Such contacts included document forgers, gunsmiths, language coaches, hackers, doctors, smugglers, and experts in other specialist f
ields. Of those, only a handful knew the true nature of his profession, and only then because he had encountered them while plying his trade and recognized their value. He maintained certain e-mail accounts so that he could contact them via prearranged means, but also so they could contact him on rare occasions. Some debts could not be paid in money alone.
Those accounts were hidden and protected as any could be, disguised by proxy servers and complex webs of ownership, data redirections, duplicates, decoys, encryptions, and ciphers. Victor never accessed the same account more than once from the same city in the same year and regularly tested the integrity of the anonymity they provided. Any account he had the slightest doubt about would be deactivated.
One crack in his security might be all it took to put an assassin just like him on his trail or bring a police tactical team to his door. Prevention over cure was one motto he had no choice but to live by. An enemy first had to successfully track him down. Having done that, the enemy needed to corner him while remaining undetected. And should the enemy manage that, there still remained the difficult task of actually killing him.
He had no doubt it would happen. He conducted himself as though death’s touch was only a handsbreadth away. He would never make it to old age. Each job he undertook created more danger and added new enemies. But it was an impossible cycle to break free of. Working kept him sharp. Retirement meant the certain erosion of his skills, and there was nowhere on the planet he could hide where no one could ever find him. Life was short. Time was precious. Which was why he took enjoyment from it whenever he could.
He checked to see that the bar had a card reader and said, “Can I buy you a drink?” to the Asian woman with the short hair.
She smiled. “Sure, why not?”
Chapter 8
The night air was cold on Victor’s tongue. He liked winter. He liked the taste of it. He walked along the path pedestrians had carved through an ankle-high layer of snow that covered the pavement, his footprints blending into those imprinted before him. The snow crunched beneath his shoes. His breath clouded with each exhale but his hands hung loose by his hips; cold, but hands confined in warm pockets were useless.
His destination was close. He knew where it lay at the center of a neighborhood of social housing built during the Communist era. Most had been deserted and derelict when he had last visited years before. Now some of the crumbling tenements had been torn down and replaced by newer buildings that were cleaner but no less unattractive than their neighbors. Cars crawled past, headlights filtering through the falling snow that kept the road white. Black slush lined the gutters, a product of the day’s traffic, now frozen.
Victor kept to the shadows, avoiding the spill of streetlights, and stopped when he was sure the two guys waiting outside the bar entrance were not regular doormen. They had the right dimensions but their coats were too expensive. He watched them for a moment. The light coming from inside the bar illuminated them well enough that Victor could estimate their ages and when they had last shaved. They didn’t see him in return. He couldn’t read their lips because they weren’t talking. They were alert and concentrating on the vehicles and pedestrians that drove and walked by.
He had expected to find guards. He would have been concerned if he hadn’t seen any. That would mean they were skilled enough to avoid his detection and had the motivation to. The two meatheads would not be the full contingent of heavies. There would be more inside the bar and others out back.
An alleyway took him to the narrow street behind the bar that ran parallel to the one in front. Two more guys stood outside the bar’s rear entrance. One leaned against a stack of crates, smoking a cigarette, but he still looked just as focused and wary as his partner or the two out front. Victor couldn’t enter the bar without first being spotted. The person he was here to meet did not want Victor getting close without being aware of it. But the guards didn’t need to be so obvious to do that. They were stationed out in the open to ensure Victor saw them. There were two reasons for this. The first was the most obvious: it was a show of strength to dissuade him from any violent intentions he might have. The second was to say this wasn’t an ambush. The guards were in plain sight in an attempt to convince him there was nothing to be concerned about.
Victor wasn’t convinced. He trusted no one. He alone would decide whether to be concerned or not, but his guard wouldn’t drop in either case.
He approached the rear entrance. His contact would have expected that and put his best men before it. Victor usually preferred to do the unexpected, but not this time. The person he was here to meet would be reassured by his calculation proving correct. He would feel confident in his management of the encounter. Victor would seem more predictable and controllable.
Less dangerous. Victor liked people to think that.
He approached the two guards.
When he was twenty meters away the closest spotted him and used the back of a hand to bat the other man on the arm. Both looked Victor’s way. They straightened as he grew nearer and they were surer of his identity. They stood with feet shoulder width apart, hands by their hips but tension in their arms. He walked at a slow, measured pace, his gaze moving back and forth from one to the other. Their lips stayed closed. The one with the cigarette tossed it away. There was half an inch of white paper between the burning end and the filter. It landed on the road and extinguished.
When he was ten meters away their nerves showed. One clenched his fists. The other shuffled. Neither had spoken a word since they had spotted him. Which meant they weren’t in constant communication with those inside. Which reduced, if not eliminated, the chances of the meeting doubling as an ambush.
They were both taller than him, the first by an inch, the second by three. Both had the wide shoulders and thick arms of guys who spent a lot of time in the gym. He wasn’t sure if they swallowed or injected their anabolic steroids, but they were long-term abusers. Growth-hormone users too—they had the telltale good skin but enlarged skulls with prominent eyebrow bones and protruding abdomens full of artificially distended intestines. They were more than just muscle, though. Victor’s contact hired only ex-military. He wanted men who could shoot as well as punch.
“Stop right there,” the bigger one said when Victor was less than three meters away.
Victor did as he was told. He kept his hands at his side, palms open. A passive posture.
“You’re him, yes?”
“That depends,” Victor answered back in Russian.
The man nodded to himself. “Yeah, you’re him all right.”
“If you say so.”
“Weapon?”
Victor shook his head.
“I don’t believe you.”
“Then you’d better search me.” Victor held out his arms in invitation.
For a moment no one moved. Then the bigger one gestured at the shorter man to do so. He didn’t. He motioned for his companion to do the searching himself. They stared at each other, gazes and facial expressions doing the silent arguing but reaching no mutually agreeable conclusion. So neither man held a position of seniority. No one had to follow the other’s orders and neither wanted to search Victor. They had been well briefed.
He sighed loud enough to interrupt the power struggle and began unbuttoning his overcoat. Only the bottom two of the four buttons were fastened. That snapped their attention back to him. They stiffened, unsure what was happening, but Victor was moving too slowly and deliberately to be threatening. The smaller man reached into a pocket regardless, and kept it there when Victor took off the coat and let it fall to the pavement.
He stood there for a moment, passive and docile. Then, just as slowly, he held open his suit jacket. The two guards stared, concentration and confusion in their eyes.
Victor turned around on the spot, lifting the jacket tails as he gave them his back so they had an uninterrupted view of his waistband. He faced them again
and exposed the linings of his empty trouser pockets. He pulled up the cuffs of his trousers, one at a time. He did the same with his sleeves.
“See? No weapon.”
They looked at each other again, this time more relaxed as they now didn’t need to get any closer to him than they had to.
“So are we good?” Victor asked with a lightness in his voice and a half smile, making fun of the situation.
The smaller man exhaled. The other shrugged. Then both nodded.
Victor extended the smile as he retrieved his overcoat from the ground. “Too cold for messing around longer than necessary, right, guys?”
He brushed off the snow with the back of his hand. They were smiling too now—three men finding humor after a moment of unnecessary tension.
He closed the distance to the two guards, still smiling, and held out the coat in both hands, elbows bent and near his waist, and gestured with it to the smaller of the two.
“Hold this for me until I come back out.”
He asked no question so there was no need for the man to decide on an answer. They were all smiling and relaxed now there was no threat. The man didn’t hesitate. He didn’t think to analyze the request. He took a step nearer and reached for Victor’s coat, bringing his hand out of the pocket so he could take it in both. His fingers gripped the coat.
Victor released it, grabbed the guard’s wrists and yanked him closer.
He stumbled, off-balance, into the head butt that Victor launched at his face.
The strongest part of Victor’s body—the curve of the forehead—collided with the bridge of the man’s nose. Bone crunched. Cartilage flattened. Blood exploded from the nostrils in two downward jets and drenched the man’s shirt.
Victor sidestepped away to let him stagger forward under his own momentum. That he didn’t go straight down was testament to the man’s toughness, but, unconscious or not, he would be out of the fight for as long as Victor needed him to be.